by Daniel Hecht
He had reached the landing when he first heard the noise, a quiet, rhythmic sound that had been concealed by the drum of his own accelerating heart and the jet-engine hiss of blood in his ears. A sharp, regular sound, almost metallic, echoing in the big room. It sounded like a saber being shd into and out of its scabbard, but fast, faster than anyone could have drawn a long blade.
Paul squatted on the landing, back to the wall, facing the stairs. From here he could see all of the balcony and most of the downstairs floor, with only the side of the room directly below him out of view. If lead time were what he wanted, there was no better vantage point. Below him and across the room, the wreckage of Mo lay in its blackening pool of blood.
The shicka-shicka-shicka grew louder, then faded, then began to swell again. He remembered it now: from the memory, the incident in the woods, thirty years ago. Shicka-shicka-shicka. Filing, sawing, a blade in and out of its sheath. Abruptly he knew what it was. Stropes had shown him. Of course: To sustain the hyperkinetic-hyperdynamic state, the aerobic metabolism needed oxygen. The berserker needed to gulp air like a ramjet engine. The noise was the shriek of air in its throat, the sound of its frenzied breathing.
The thought brought back an image of Hyper Jack convulsing on Stropes's computer screen, and visualizing the processes required suddenly made Paul sick. The berserker was no longer human, no longer even animal. It was more ofa machine, an engine driven by a sustained biochemical explosion, ruthless, mindless, unstoppable.
A rending crash came from the area of the library, causing the floor to pulse. Afterward he couldn't seem to hear the berserker's breathing for a moment. He shook his head. His ears seemed stuffed with cotton, deafened by the roar of his own bloodstream.
He crouched, clenching the gun in his right hand, steadying his wrist with the other hand as he'd seen Mo do. He was startled when a new sound penetrated his deafness: a creaking screech, small but intense, like some insect. As he waited, listening, it came again, tiny, a grating squeal. Nearby.
Suddenly he realized what the noise was. Of course. Every piece fit perfectly, as if inevitable, as if preordained.
Downstairs the berserker was making crashing noises again, shaking the house, but Paul ignored it. He was staring in fascination at the gun in his right hand. The gun was the source of the new noise. As he watched, it creaked again. It was the force ofhis hand on the plastic grips. They were moving minutely against the steel, under enormous pressure. Amazing. In his hand, the gun was deforming slightly, screaming like a suffering thing. Oh, yes, the blood tells. Every time.
The house shook again and suddenly a shotgun blast of debris sprayed into the big room, followed by a cloud of plaster dust. The berserker had burst through the wall of the library, out of view beneath the near end of the balcony.
His conscious thoughts were small and fleeting, birds tossed in a rising internal whirlwind. He held against the state, yearning for the release but at the same time afraid of how deep it might go. He had to stay conscious, deliberate, intentional, if there was any chance he could keep Lia and Mark alive. With the state fully on him, would he know them?
Would he be able to stop the juggernaut inside him? The soldiers in the Army Intelligence experiments had disemboweled each other.
He could just do it, he realized, he could just hold himself in. And the only reason was that he'd had thirty years of practice. In a way it's just another tic, a huge big seductive all-consuming rabid killer-whale big-bang ofa tic. lean keep it down for a while. Thank you, Ben, curse you, you never could have guessed how your most difficult lesson has affected my life. A lifetime of holding back.
The berserker state would be there if he relaxed his guard, if he got pushed too far. He'd be fighting on two fronts, the war with the creature in his head and the war with the monster loose in the house. Which was more dangerous? For a moment his control wavered and he felt a wave of hate for both of them. Abruptly the gun's grip deformed in his hand like clay. He loosened his fingers and set the .38 carefully down on the floor.
He got control again, stood up, and stepped toward the stairs. Come on. Try me, try to take me apart. Only this time you'll be up against one of your own kind. Up against another berserker. Another thought occurred to him. For only an instant he was surprised at it, and then knew it with certainty: Which is exactly what you've wanted all along.
67
THE BERSERKER CAME OUT from under the balcony and into the room, just a blur, leaving a trail of bare footprints in the powdering of plaster dust. Its skin was dusted white, streaks of brilliant pink showing where sweat had run and washed it clean again. Its clothes were ragged, torn away by its exertions. It slowed as it came into the center of the big space, looking around with a face like a grimacing demon mask. Dancing in place, pulsating with its breathing, it turned as if searching for something. For me, Paul knew.
Stropes forgot about one characteristic of the HHK/HHD state, he realized. The heat. Even this far away, he could feel the radiant glow the berserker gave off, like an out of control woodstove. A by-product of all that glucose oxidation, all that metabolic activity: body heat. His conscious thoughts floated on the surface of the chaos inside him, like a thin crust of ice over turbulent water.
"Here I am," he said. It came out hugely loud, a single explosive exhalation. The berserker spun to face him, clicked to face him. "Here I am, Vivien. What now?"
Her mouth drew back in a grin that stretched her face until Paul was sure the skin would rip. Her big, half-naked body was in constant motion: chest convulsing, spine rippling, limbs moving, as if she were full of separate struggling living things, snakes under the skin.
For a moment he held back the bursting energies inside him. Then a spike of fear came, his thoughts stuttered, and the tiny conscious part of him recognized the seizures, the HHK/HHD seizures. His control slipped and without thought he was running across the room toward her. She didn't move until the last second, and then she was gone from his view. Something hit his back and he accelerated, rocketing headfirst into the far wall. The painted surface loomed in his vision and exploded and then he was through the wall, lying with half his body in the dark of one of the downstairs closets, tangled in broken lathe and chunks of plaster. He shook off the encumbering debris and stood up. The wall seemed to have the texture of a reed mat, eerily insubstantial.
He turned. The berserker was back in the middle of the room, full of motion, the embodiment of everything fearful. Just as terrifying was the presence he sensed in his body, in his skull: He could feel it in there, as if a cobra reared erect, ready to strike, its swollen hood arched taut over his brain.
Vivien's blood-gorged eyes seemed to snap like a camera shutter, seeing all of him instantly and utterly, assessing his metabolic state in a microsecond. As if she'd seen his internal resistance, a ghost of disappointment passed quickly across her face, replaced instantly by rage. The heaving of her chest accelerated, her breathing shrieked, and she was moving toward him. One of her flailing arms caught him in the cheek and lashed his head backward. His body spun and he lost balance again, smashing face first into the oak plank stairs. The sudden pain, even through the haze of endorphins, affronted him, stirred his rising fear.
Without thinking he grabbed one of the fallen newel posts and thrust it at her, a hundred pounds of solid oak oddly weightless in his hands. She batted it away, hit him with the side of her arm and the room blurred and exploded.
Paul sat up out of the plaster dust, scrambled on all fours along the wall. He had just tasted it that time, the edge of complete release. It was a rage that knew no limits. He had to avoid it at all costs.
Vivien rushed at him again, scything the air with her arms and legs with the noise of a sword being swung.
He grabbed another newel post, pitched it at her. She swatted at it and it skated, spinning, away. Then a blur came toward him and though he ducked he was far too slow and the room tumbled as his body cartwheeled into the wall. Vivien followed through, coming
against him with her whole body and for an instant he felt it iron-hard and burning hot against him, the one solid thing in the dreamlike insubstantiality of the house. Her breath stank, a sharp smell as the flood of arousal chemicals in her bloodstream outgassed. Abruptly she pivoted and then it seemed as if the house fell on him. Great weight, brutal impact, the chaos of noise and motion and pain suddenly fading, going distant. The world contracted to a pinpoint of light surrounded by blackness.
And then roared back. He struggled up from unconsciousness to find himself lying against the great hearth. Reflexively he jerked upright to see Vivien, her whole body throbbing like a tortured heart, watching him from a dozen feet away. His legs gave way and he fell to the floor again, tried to rise, fell, waited.
Vivien's breathing slowed markedly, and the sight paradoxically terrified him. Her sentient self struggled briefly for control, face contorting with the effort as the machine resisted. Then she became by degrees at least a parody ofhis aunt. For the first time, Paul realized what he was up against: She's had thirty years of practice commanding her neurological state too. The true berserker, learning her own triggers, willing the state to come on, learning to kindle and to quench it, coming to know its preposterous freedoms.
Her first words came out in staccato bursts, then slowed as her metabolism calmed. "I won't let you off the hook that easily," she rasped. "Because you've made such a promising start. That would have killed anyone else, you know. But it's only a start. Wake up, Paulie! Do you know how long I have wanted to dance with an equal? With one who knew this, who had any idea of this power and ecstasy? You will dance with me, or I'll kill you. I won't be denied!"
"Why?" he croaked. Meaning all of it.
She spat like a cat, disgusted with him. "The question why is not your basic impulse. That's a rHental question. The real you doesn't want to know anything. You are full of anger and fear and hate. When you ask why, you're lying, aren't you? An old self-deceiving habit. Base your actions on your real urges, Paulie, then you'll have some power. Power to affect things, to affect the outcome. And isn't that what you really want? Really, what you want is to hurt me, isn't it? To kill me?"
When he couldn't answer, her mouth drew into a sneer. "You're soft, nephew, you' re flaccid, you're nowhere near it yet. You're still in your straitjacket!" She was goading him, he realized. Groping for his triggers. Trying to get him to join her, her endless desperate search for companionship. Dance with me.
"This is what you did with my father." He'd spoken the words before he was aware of the realization. "You were there with him at Break Neck."
Vivien's face writhed, sorrow wrestling with her manic excitement.
"You are a very perceptive boy, aren't you?"
"You killed him."
"I loved your father. I tried to awaken Ben, Paulie. I tried to give him life. I had told him about this, I believed it was what he, of all people, could have the hunger for."
"So you threw him over."
"He wasn't coming around. I thought if his life was really at peril we could share . . . this." Vivien seemed to falter slightly. "This was before I knew about the hereditary factors. I thought everyone could . . . awaken. But now I know better."
There had to be a way to stop her. If she could try to control his neurochemistry, arouse him, maybe he could do the same for her: awaken her conscious mind, damp the berserker reflex. Keep her talking, keep her thinking. Maybe there was a chink in the berserker's armor. He was twenty-five years younger, heavier, more muscular—surely if he were to fight her in a normal state he could overwhelm her. He'd have to take her by surprise, incapacitate her immediately, before the reflex kicked in. The first step was to keep her talking, reasoning.
"You're full of shit," he said. "That's what you've been telling yourself, but it's a lie. You went up there and Ben told you it was over between you two, didn't he? And that's when you conveniently thought to test him. And you've been lying to yourself ever since."
For an instant her face registered agony, but then the anger and pride reasserted itself. "You have no idea what it is like to be a singularity! To be the only one of your kind in a world of sleepwalkers, anesthetized by their reasoning minds. Shitting little hamsters in their wire cages. A world of ghosts, no more substantial than a cloud of gnats!" Her arrogance returned. Good, Paul thought. Another step toward her humanity. Toward her vulnerability.
"Do you know how I know you're lying to yourself? Because you tried the same thing with your gardener, with Falcone, two years before you killed Ben. Because I saw you that day, in the woods. I tripped on his fucking head while you were busy turning him into pork chops."
She looked at him in astonishment. "I often wondered whether you had seen—you were so traumatized by your walk in the woods! Yes, the raging bull came back to threaten me after his stay in prison. Such a beautiful body. Such a good lover the first times, before his Catholic guilt caught up with him. Yes, I became very angry with him. Very." She grimaced, as if her face could not decide whether to frown or smile. "Yes, I killed my lover! Yes, I felt entitled to love and affection and sex, as deserving as my mouse ofa sister."
Keep her talking, Paul thought, standing slowly upright. Quench the reflex. "So by the time you went up there with Ben, you knew from firsthand experience that not everyone could do it—just a threat wouldn't awaken it in everybody. A rare combination of neurological and anatomical characteristics. One in a million. You had to know. You killed my father because he rejected you. You were angry, you lost control." Where were Mark and Lia? "You killed your lover like a black widow spider."
Her face twitched again, and he realized he'd made a mistake. Her triggers. Her chest started pumping again. She moaned, a keen of grief.
"Don't you see? I had no choice! I would have lost Ben whether he went down that mountain still a sleepwalker, going back to his wife, or fell and died! Oh, Ben!" Her jaw dropped, mouth opening wide as a soul-deep anguish stretched her whole face. "There's a place in all of us," she panted, "where no one dares to go. Where it is too dangerous to go because there's a storm compressed inside it. I go there, Paulie. I live there! Yes, I went to Break Neck that day with your father. Yes, I regretted it, yes I hated the loneliness after I lost Ben. For years afterward I tried not to need so much, tried not to indulge the hunger. That's how much 1 loved him. But who hasn't felt what I felt when rejected by a lover? Shall I be blamed because I have a unique capacity to act upon feelings every human being feels?"
She quelled her rising agitation, and a cunning light came into her eyes. "Yes, I killed your father. I betrayed your mother by seducing him. I killed your friend the detective. I'm going to kill you. Surely you're entitled to hate me for all that. Now, don't I deserve to die? Don't you want to kill me?"
Yes, he thought, that's there. A hard, dense thing in him, like a piece of plutonium, a bomb, close to critical mass. And yet he couldn't let it. She's looking for the thing that will set me off.
"And what else?" Vivien was saying. "Look at yourself. Neurological problems all your life, not just one but two different conditions. Money problems. A son crippled by a neurological disorder he inherited from you. An angry ex-wife who is scheming to get him away from you. Don't you wish you could strike out, vent the anger and frustration?" She held his head between her hands, bathing him in her chemical breath. "What about all that wasted potential, Paulie?
Such a bright child, such a fizzled adulthood. Look at you: You're thirty-eight, you've got a fine mind, a master's degree, and yet you were overjoyed to get a couple of weeks of manual labor, picking up my house! Doesn't that make you angry?" She watched him closely, searching for the effects of her goading. "Can't you feel it in you?" she asked, knowing he could.
With all his strength he struck at her. Before his fist connected the air hissed into her lungs, she had his arm and was swinging him, flinging him across the room and out into the middle of the floor. Her mouth made a popping sound like an engine kicking over, cheeks puffing
out and slapping against her teeth as her lungs pumped explosively. And he knew that he'd failed. The state was upon her instantly. Before he could recover, she was on him again, tumbling him over and over, toward the far corner of the room. When she came at him again he resisted briefly before being thrown through the wall, on into Royce's bedroom. The impact dizzied him. As he tried to get up, his legs failed him, and he sat down on the floor again. Vivien loomed over him, clutched his head against her shuddering iron-hard stomach, and as she squeezed he heard the bones shift in his skull.
Only one way to survive. He opened himself wide to the reflex, felt the snake rise, the hood of the cobra spreading in his brain, its body stiffening in his spinal cord. His breathing accelerated again, tiny stutters of seizure rippled his thoughts, and the anger loosened in him. He swung his arms up and managed to bat her hands loose, then got his legs under him and drove his shoulder into her stomach.
She fell away from him, but within an instant came back, impossibly fast. Paul felt himself driven backward through the wall, into the big room again, saw the pieces of wall float slowly away. Already she was hunched over him, starting to shake his shoulders, and in desperation he gave himself to the hatred of her.
And it wasn't enough. It wasn't there. It wouldn't come. The voice of his conscious mind, though shrill and small, wouldn't cease. He couldn't let go all the way, couldn't match her. Her grip crushed the bones ofhis shoulders and pain shrieked in his nerves and his flailing hands did nothing to stop her. She was killing him.
Abruptly she tossed him aside and walked away, spat, disgusted. Again her motions slowed as she mastered her neurochemistry.
"That's it? That's all your self-preservation instincts are good for?" She screamed with frustration and swiped at the wall with one clawed hand, spewing splinters across the room. She grabbed the flesh of her own face and tortured it, pulling her cheeks, shrieking. Then she regulated herself further, breathing subsiding again, motions slowing.
